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Universities whose work has driven environmental awareness

As the Paris Agreement to limit global temperature rises comes into force this month, these are the universities that have, between 2011 and 2015, produced the environmental science research with the greatest impact

The most highly cited papers from these institutions in this period are dominated by research into climate change and the global ecosystem.

They include research from the University of Copenhagen in 2011 that warned that we are entering the Anthropocene age; in this era, mankind is having as big an impact on the planet as geophysical processes and risks “driving the Earth System onto a trajectory toward more hostile states from which we cannot easily return”.

Several of the most cited articles have authors from two or more of the institutions, underlining the collaborative nature of environmental research: a 2013 analysis of the effect of soot, or “black carbon”, on the climate had authors from both the University of Leeds and Princeton University, as well as nearly 30 other scholars.

A 2014 paper estimated that the world has been destroying trillions of dollars of “ecosystem services” a year through environmental destruction, and featured authors from both the Australian National University and Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands.

The data come from Elsevier’s Scopus research database, and rank the institutions by their field-weighted citation impact, which accounts for different citation levels across subjects.